A credit card issuer, such as a bank or other financial institution, generally provides credit accounts to customers, or cardholders, allowing the customers to make purchases on credit rather than using cash. A customer incurs debt with each credit card purchase which may be repaid over time according to the terms and conditions of the particular customer's credit account. Credit card accounts provide a customer one or more lines of credit, typically including at least one revolving credit line in which the customer may choose to pay the full amount of debt owed on an account by a specified date or alternatively defer payment of all or a portion of the debt to a later date. The credit card issuer typically charges the customer interest or finance charges for such deferred payments during the period of deferral. The credit card issuer typically establishes a credit limit for each credit account defining the maximum amount of credit available to the customer for making purchases at any given time. When a customer makes a credit card purchase, the amount of credit available to the customer, often called the available balance, is reduced by the amount of the purchase, and the amount of debt currently owed by the customer, often called the outstanding balance, is increased by the amount of the purchase.
Providing relatively low lines of credit to customers may be disadvantageous to a credit card issuer. Customers tend to dislike low lines of credit, and attrition among customers with low credit lines tends to be relatively high. Customers with low lines of credit may also give the credit card issuer bad word-of-mouth publicity, hurting the ability of the credit card issuer to acquire new customers. In addition, customers with lower lines of credit may tend to use their credit cards less often than customers with higher lines of credit. Moreover, providing low lines of credit to customers may cause low morale among employees of the credit card issuer, who may feel as though they are working as “loan sharks” or in some other disreputable capacity. However, considerable risk to the credit card issuer is often associated with certain customers, and providing higher lines of credit to those customers may increase losses incurred by the credit card issuer.